The present invention generally relates to manufacturing, remanufacturing or repairing replaceable imaging components, and more particularly to apparatus and techniques for modifying a replaceable imaging cartridge to operate with a replacement electronic circuit.
In the imaging industry, there is a growing market for the remanufacture and refurbishing of various types of replaceable imaging cartridges such as toner cartridges, drum cartridges, inkjet cartridges, and the like. These imaging cartridges are used in imaging devices such as laser printers, xerographic copiers, inkjet printers, facsimile machines and the like, for example. Imaging cartridges, once spent, are unusable for their originally intended purpose. Without a refurbishing process these cartridges would simply be discarded, even though the cartridge itself may still have potential life. As a result, techniques have been developed specifically to address this issue. These processes may entail, for example, the disassembly of the various structures of the cartridge, replacing toner or ink, cleaning, adjusting or replacing any worn components and reassembling the imaging cartridge.
Some imaging cartridges may include a chip having a memory device which is used to store data related to the cartridge or the imaging device, such as a printer, for example. Typically a cartridge chip is a printed circuit board (PCB) having circuit components mounted thereon. The imaging device may communicate with the chip using a direct contact method or a broadcast technique utilizing radio frequency (RF) communication. This chip is typically mounted in a location, such as a slot, on the cartridge to allow for proper communication between the printer and the toner cartridge when the cartridge is installed in the printer. When the toner cartridge is being remanufactured, as described above, the chip provided by the original equipment manufacturer (OEM), such as Hewlett-Packard or Lexmark, may need to be replaced by a compatible chip developed by a third party. Such a replacement chip may be larger and not have the same physical form factor as the OEM chip and thus may not fit into the slot on the toner cartridge. Thus, it would be desirable to provide techniques for solving this problem and allowing a replacement chip having a different form factor be installed on the toner cartridge by, for example, modifying the toner cartridge to accept the replacement chip.
Some imaging devices have electrical contacts that are spring loaded or otherwise physically forced against the cartridge chip contacts. U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,380,904 and 7,588,318 and U.S. Pub. Patent Application No. 2012/0062662 are examples this type of imaging device. These documents are incorporated by reference. In these imaging devices, colors are printed using four color cartridges: black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. The four cartridges slide in a carriage mounted in the printer in order to feed ink to the document during the printing operation. The cartridges fit tightly into the carriage with little room for additional external components. Therefore, when replacing the original chip, the replacement chip and the installation process must allow continuing functionality without sacrificing size. In these devices, the cartridge chip may damage the imaging device electrical contacts if the cartridge chip is raised too much above the surface of the cartridge. Alternatively, if the cartridge chip is recessed too much within the cartridge surface, a secure electrical connection may not be achievable.